Persistence

What it all boils down to is that racism – white racial grievance, immigration restriction, generalized bashing of basically any political or cultural assertion by African-Americans – is the only consistent and persistent line connecting the campaign to the presidency. This is not quite the same as saying that that’s the only real bottom line for his supporters – though there’s a lot of truth to that. But for Trump, that’s clearly the only thing that isn’t opportunistic and situational. Those all fall away. The only thing that doesn’t is the ethno-nationalism and racism. It’s the real him.

This week everybody was talking about tax reform

and Michael Flynn

Last week we knew that Flynn’s lawyers had stopped cooperating with the President’s lawyers, so many speculated that Flynn was about to make a deal with Robert Mueller’s investigation. This week it happened: Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, and is cooperating with Mueller. This isn’t a trivial crime, in that it could lead to as much as five years in jail. But it’s also far less than Mueller could have gone for, and Flynn’s son has not been charged with anything.

It is easy to start speculating about what Flynn might know and be willing to share. The particular crime in his guilty plea seems chosen to reveal as little as possible. Trump supporters have jumped on this to imply Mueller has nothing, but those familiar with how plea deals work are pointing in another direction. Vox asked 9 legal experts for their reactions, and got stuff like this:

The fact that Flynn was charged with, and is pleading guilty to, such a minor crime suggests a bombshell of a deal with prosecutors. Flynn was facing serious criminal liability for a variety of alleged missteps, including his failure to register as an agent of a foreign power. If this is the entirety of the plea deal, the best explanation for why Mueller would agree to it is that Flynn has something very valuable to offer in exchange: damaging testimony on someone else.

In general, prosecutors use small fish to catch big fish. Flynn was Trump’s National Security Adviser, so there aren’t a lot of bigger fish Mueller could be using him against.

That could explain why Trump has been so wiggy lately, even by his own standards.

He’s denying the Access Hollywood tape is real. He’s back to saying Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Then publicly he retweeted those anti-Muslim hate group videos from the UK. Yesterday we heard he’s telling advisors a government shutdown would be good for him. He’s gotten more aggressive attacking other politicians accused of sexual misconduct while more aggressively backing Roy Moore, notwithstanding the copious list of accusations against him. All of it together amounts to acting out.

Legal experts said this could be used as evidence that the president was trying to obstruct justice when he allegedly asked James Comey to take it easy on Flynn and then, when he didn’t, fired him as FBI director.

The ongoing mystery of Flynn’s lies to the FBI is how he could be that stupid. As a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn had to know that conversations with the Russian ambassador were monitored, and that he would be caught in his lie if anybody bothered to check. So why do it?

Josh Marshall, who is working from publicly available information and knows nothing more than the rest of us do, has put some thought into this and has as good a working theory as I’ve seen. The short version is that Flynn wanted to get a new Russia policy installed before revelations of Russia’s campaign meddling made that impossible. So it was important to be doing groundwork during the transition period, when he had no authority to do it, and to hide that groundwork as long as possible from both the still-in-power Obama administration and the people within the intelligence services who would fight against the new policy. The new Russia relationship

had to become a fait accompli before the full story emerged. Indeed, if the Trump Team could get in place before most of the information was revealed it might never become known at all since they would take over the key agencies doing the investigating.

ABC initially reported that Flynn reached out to the Russians on Trump’s behalf before the election, but has withdrawn the report and suspended the reporter.

still more sexual harassment reports

These last few weeks, I’ve been struggling with how to express my own complicity in the culture’s objectification of women without presenting myself as either better or worse than I’ve actually been.

In “7 Reasons So Many Guys Don’t Understand Sexual Consent” David Wong does a great job writing the kind of article I haven’t been able to produce. In particular, he captures the shame so many of us felt about failing to achieve the truly fucked-up vision of manliness we were taught to admire: the James Bond kind of man, who can force himself on women and make them like it.

I never, in any of my public school years, had a lesson saying you needed to wait for verbal consent before touching a woman. I saw the quarterback of the football team slap girls on the butt, I saw guys reach around and grab girls’ boobs as a prank, I saw mistletoe hung over doorways and was told if you and a girl stood under it, she had to kiss you. One time when we were playing volleyball at the beach, Dr. Dre ran up and unhooked a girl’s bikini top.

Again, I never did any of those things. Not because I thought they were wrong, but because I was too nervous.

And I fucking hated myself for it.

Have I mentioned that yet? How much shame I felt at the time for not being a “real man”?

By my 20s, I think I had developed a reasonably healthy respect for women as human beings, but in high school and earlier I remember “pranks” and “jokes” (like the ones Wong mentions) as fairly common. There was a “game” going on between the two sexes: Boys were supposed to try to get away with stuff and girls were supposed to try to stop them. Our collective mythology said it was all in good fun, even if a few spoilsports didn’t get it.

At the time, I think we’d have laughed at anyone who suggested that we were training to be rapists (which I don’t recall that anyone did suggest). But in retrospect, of course we were.

[R]idding guys of toxic attitudes toward women is a monumental task. I’ve spent two solid decades trying to deprogram myself, to get on board with something that, in retrospect, should be patently obvious to any decent person. Changing actions is the easy part; changing urges takes years and years. It’s the difference between going on a diet and training your body to not get hungry at all.

In the meantime, to act like it’s crazy that a particular guy doesn’t see the clear line between consent and assault is misguided. The culture has intentionally blurred those lines and trained that man to feel shame for erring on either side.

meanwhile, Roy Moore is probably going to the Senate

The RCP polling average was in Doug Jones’ favor for about ten days, but Moore caught up on November 27 and appears to be surging ahead. This is not because there has been any good news for Moore. Alabamans have just gotten used to the idea that they’re going to elect a child molester, because he’s the Christian candidate.

It also looks like the Senate will let him take his seat. Sunday, Mitch McConnell said “We’re going to let the people of Alabama decide, a week from Tuesday, who they want to send to the Senate.”

Last Monday, The Washington Post revealed an attempted sting by Project Veritas, the James O’Keefe group responsible for a number of deceptively edited videos to smear liberal groups, including ACORN (his original, successful operation, which forced the organization to close, even if O’Keefe himself did end up paying a $100K settlement).

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15.

But rather than jumping on the chance to besmirch Moore, the Post became increasingly suspicious of the woman’s story, and eventually tracked her back to Project Veritas.

We can only guess what would have happened if the Post had been less careful and the sting had worked, but I assume it would have been used to undermine the credibility not just of the Post, but of all of Moore’s accusers.

and you also might be interested in …

While commenting on the strange announcement of Kellyanne Conway as the White House’s point person on opioids, The Atlanticsummarizes the opioid effort as a whole:

The Trump administration has no opioid policy, beyond just continuing to arrest people who violate the (lax) existing drug laws. Throughout, Trump has treated the opioid tragedy as a messaging challenge, not a real-world disaster that calls for a real-world response: pretend to care while doing nothing, because the administration lacks the competence and capacity to do something. The idea that it would seek to appoint as head of the Office of National Drug Control the single member of the House of Representatives who did most to worsen the opioid crisis had a beautiful fitness to it.

So maybe after all Kellyanne Conway would be the right person for the “opioid czar” job. Trump’s concern for opioids is a cruelly deceptive fiction. And who propagates cruelly deceptive fictions more persistently and brazenly than Conway?

BTW, that “single member of the House of Representatives who did the most to worsen the opioid crisis” is Tom Marino. After 60 Minutes exposed his function as a tool of Big Pharma, he withdrew from consideration as drug czar. He continues to represent Pennsylvania’s 10th district.

Filmmaker Sierra Pettengil:

I was struck by the way the word “history” was blankly lobbed as a defense of the [Confederate] monuments. Take Trump’s reaction, for one: “They’re trying to take away our history.” My instinct was, “Okay, then: Let’s look at the history.”

In particular, her short film Graven Image looks at the Stone Mountain monument in Georgia, where a gigantic carving of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson is known as “the South’s Mount Rushmore”. The film recalls Stone Mountain as the site of the KKK’s rebirth in 1915, and chronicles how progress on the monument paralleled Georgia’s resistance to civil rights.

Inmy film, a voiceover from a 1972 Stone Mountain promotional film says, “Remember how it used to be? It’s still that way for you to enjoy at Stone Mountain Park.” I want this film to make us remember how it actuallyused to be.

and let’s close with something magical

“The magician is the most honest of professionals,” said Karl Germain. “He promises to deceive you, and then he does.” Here, a guy I’ve known since he was a baby (and his partner in crime, who I didn’t meet until last spring) fulfills that promise. And in the finest magical tradition, they do it with mirrors.